A new partnership between OCR and the Educational Recording Agency (ERA) gives teachers easy access to free educational videos directly relevant to their OCR qualifications – all available through the ERA Video Streaming Platform, which is free to schools covered by the ERA Licence. 

Video content helps to engage students and add variety to lessons, but most content available for free online is not licensed, is poor quality, or can be misleadingly described and contain inappropriate content. 

Many teachers also express concern about the risks of automated ‘play next’ features that can suggest distracting content after an online video has finished playing. Ad-breaks mid-play, further disrupt teaching time and student focus, while others do not have time to search for sometimes obscure content, and many older clips from educational programmes simply do not exist online. 

Jon Newton, a Geography teacher in the West Midlands, said that “the often unreliable content on popular video-sharing sites” makes it “a bit of a gamble whether a clip would be directly relevant to the topic”. He said: “Clips … often disappear unexpectedly due to copyright issues, leaving me scrambling for alternatives. Pre-roll adverts can disrupt lesson flow and distract students.”

Barry Kirkpatrick, a senior teacher in Northern Ireland said: “I could go to iPlayer, I can go to Channel 4, and do all that searching but that’s so, so time consuming. Maybe [a programme] is there for two years and we’ll have a link and then all of a sudden it disappears.”

ERA provides a central collection of thousands of videos, all of which are licensed to be used in schools, removing the risks of unknown online content or falling foul of licensing laws. With this partnership, teachers are also saved the time constraints of searching for relevant content. 

The ERA and OCR teams have collated relevant videos for OCR’s GCSE Science and Geography B, and A Level Psychology and Sociology qualifications, where they can be accessed from the OCR or ERA websites and played safely and securely in classrooms. The teams will now be expanding the service, with Business Studies to be added soon. 

Peter Canning, Director of Product at OCR said: “We know how precious a teacher’s time is. The benefits of using video content to engage with students are obvious, but finding a video that is relevant, appropriate, and good enough quality takes up time that many teachers simply don’t have.” 

Helena Djurkovic, CEO at ERA said: “Broadcast resources can be a powerful means of helping pupils understand complex concepts and develop critical thinking skills essential for their learning journey. We are delighted that OCR recognises their educational value and is working with us to identify highly relevant and targeted audio-visual resources to support teaching in schools.”

Jon Newton said: “This has been invaluable for teaching a wide range of topics across the geography curriculum.”

The ERA Video Streaming Platform is free to all schools holding an ERA Licence. All state schools in England are covered by a central licensing agreement the DfE has with ERA and the vast majority of independent schools are also licensed. The extensive archive includes clips from dedicated educational programmes, as well as clips from more general programming that are relevant to certain subjects. Teachers are also able to request specific BBC clips if they are not currently available on the database.